|
Forum Rating
"Hear me, my peace-drunk brethren! You are being led astray by your weak and frail leader Queenchief Nuria. She colludes with the ponies to declaw you, to dull your fangs! Long ago the Kirin struck fear into any country touching the sea! We were rulers of bloodied coin and had respect! but now, now the ponies, the weak cowardly ponies try to take away your culture! They deny us our heritage! Join me! join me and I'll show you the true path to power! Through blood! Carnage and gold! I defeated your 'queen' in single battle... She has failed you and grown soft with her 'peace.' a lapdog for her Equestrian masters! It is time for the Kirin to return to the forefront, through fire and blood!"- The Warlord Ashwrath gave this recuitment speech in the kirin city of Aeros with a retinue of strange uniform looking kirin. Many are worried of the violence to come and are already petitioning Equestria to intervene.
Credit
|
Welcome to Multa Saecula. A set of worlds aside from just Equestria itself. Many generations ago, the plane that housed Equestria; Terra, created magical portals to other dimensions. These dimensions are Lux, a land rich with magic, yet constantly under threat from the same. And Tenebris, a dark plane where only the strong and willful survive.
These realms have existed together peacefully so far, commencing in trading, the sharing of culture, and immigration. Though their political views are much different than that of Terra, they find a way to coexist, sometimes reluctantly. Walk into this set of worlds and discover what adventure, romance, or tragedy, awaits you.
Join our community!
|
|
A Primer on Magic in Fiction; Discussing how we can deal with it here
|
|
Topic Started: Nov 17 2016, 12:27 AM (79 Views)
|
|
Pasto Delgado
|
Nov 17 2016, 12:27 AM
Post #1
|
|
- Posts:
- 15
- Group:
- Members
- Member
- #57
- Joined:
- Sep 20, 2016
|
A Primer on Magic
Above everything else I want to discuss here, I’m going to put the emphasis on one thing: There is no single right way to go about this, but for a roleplaying forum, the biggest thing that we need to look at is understanding scope, and the balance of characters within a given scope.
Here, I’m going to go through possible ways of dealing with the power level of your average mage player character, and how that reflects on non-mage characters, and ways people have struck balances between the two. To start, we’ll begin with some popular works in the public eye and how they deal with making both sorts of characters important.
To begin with one extreme, let’s go to the ever popular Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is a setting where magic is preeminent and incredibly powerful. Magic is, in fact, ridiculously powerful here, so powerful that it could easily solve any plot with just a little bit of work. And yet it doesn’t, and there are a few reasons for this. - The only people capable of working true magic are few and far between. The few who can actively do magic are some of the most ancient elves and the in-universe equivalent of angels; magic-users are not only few in number, but are inherently important and deal with problems at the scale of nations; there are no wizards serving as police or soldiers or bakers or petty thieves, the only wizards are heroes and villains that are practically forces of nature. - Of the magic users we see, most of them are not active forces in terms of actually going out and doing anything. Sauron is for the most part dead and passive, Galadriel is concerned primarily with just defending her home, none of the Valar get actively involved in the conflict, Saruman was truly powerful and active but his greatest power was subtle in the form of a compelling voice. Among these, very little combat is done with magic, and overall it seems reserved for fighting against other mages. It’s reserved for solving problems that mundane force cannot, not used as a shortcut. Yes, Gandalf shoots off spells here and there, but not big huge decisive ones, in spite of the fact that we know he’s got enough power to do such things.
- Most pressing, perhaps, is that nearly all directly-performed magic is rather weak and low quality in this particular setting. All the great works of magic take the form of material objects. The wizard staves, the Palantírs, so many artifacts are more powerful than any magic seen from someone directly casting a spell of any sort, culminating in the ultimate magic items: the Rings of Power, and by extension, the One Ring. Anyone who knows what they’re doing can use these objects, and the power is entirely something of the items, not that of the user. This shoves most magical capability into things that anyone with experience with the item in question can use; wizardry isn’t a profession for such item-users, it’s simply a circumstance of having the right items and having used them before. This also means that magic is stealable, breakable, and losable, just as fragile as a soldier’s weapons and armor and just as prone to decay over time. This also means that the sorts of magic that occur are well-defined for each item, with little variance outside of creatively applying the effects the items do have.
- The result of making what magic there is into items is that you can make magic rare, but also make it into an everyman thing; the hero can have magic of a sort without spending a few centuries mastering the art. At the same time, you can make learning magic take centuries and thus relegate the art to mentor archetypes and characters who are important enough in-setting that the problems they have to deal with are actually big enough for their magic to be taxed by it. Smaller problems are dealt with relatively low-grade magic and there are few enough casters that they can’t actually solve all the problems in the world with their power alone.
In contrast, let’s look at a series that focuses entirely on magical characters, Harry Potter. A world of magicians who are a dime a dozen… - Wizardry and witchcraft are at the forefront of this series, so we should be expecting some grand displays of magic that far outstrip any mundane solutions, right? - Well, no, not really. In fact, most of the problems we run into over the course of the series, at least from the protagonists point of view, cannot be solved with brute-force magic, and are almost always solved through clever thinking and knowledge. Harry might be the chosen one but he wasn’t chosen for magical ability, Ron is an embarrassment to wizardkind, and Hermoine, while great at magic, finds logic and problem-solving more natural to her. - Lets even look at how magic compares to modern technology in the ‘verse. Floo powder, while faster than an airplane, is far more finicky; broomsticks are slower and can’t hold all that many people, and flying cars are just an accident waiting to happen. The wizarding world has barely advanced in the last 500+ years in terms of technological understanding, or even emulation of muggle technology. It’s incredibly insular and actively hides from the threat of muggle involvement (consider, for a moment, that the muggles were winning the witch hunts hard enough to drive wizards into hiding for half a millennium). - Even great works of wizardry in this setting aren’t that big, at least the sort that we see people pull off without needing years of focused work on. Horcruxes are the biggest, baddest thing we know of, but they’re ridiculously hard to make and require a lot of work to both make and utilize. But just look at the Battle of Hogwarts in the movie...it takes the concentrated effort of all the teachers and much of the student body to defend a single medieval castle; this isn’t one wizard doing the work, it’s tens if not at least a hundred wizards working in concert in a single effort. Meanwhile it takes the wizarding equivalent of an army to take on this fortification. Keep in mind, their idea of armies numbers in the thousands at best; muggles field armies hundreds of thousands in peacetime. Magic is clearly not a big huge boom that can deal with several threats at once, and seems to be quite limited to being useful in smaller scale combat; it just doesn’t have the sort of scope needed for large-scale warfare, especially not the magic of a single person. - Magic, while ultimately tied up with being born to the right parents, relies heavily on both a magic item and verbal incantations for all but the greatest wizards. Wands can be stolen, broken, and one’s voice can be silence, all of which would leave a wizard out of the fight. - Seems, even in a world of magic, it seems that magic doesn’t break out of scope if you don’t let it.
Now let’s hit on the biggest topic of all, the one we all need to think about. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Our canon, and the thing we need to decide how we’re breaking from it, and to what degree.
- Biggest thing. Biggest thing of them all. Unicorns are not all-rounders. They do not all get a bunch of spells. They are one-trick ponies. Almost all unicorns only know a tiny subset of spells directly related to their special talent and their cutie mark, accompanied with telekinesis. Other unicorns literally cannot do what Twilight can do, she stands out as being a pony whose talent is magic, so she basically got handed the cheat codes in this regard. - No, I don’t know what this means Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns is for, but it’s probably either a lot of theory or it’s a great vocational academy. - Yes, this does mean that even the unicorns get dragged into a job decided by their buttmark and they get little/no choice in the matter, but the simple fact of the matter is that the show also makes it very clear that your special talent and your cutie mark are a mark of self-actualization, not some arbitrary outside force. You cannot get a cutie mark that you actively hate (provided that you’ve actually interpreted it correctly, incorrect interpretations aren’t disproven yet); they don’t work that way. - Pegasi and earth ponies are also magic, that’s canon too. But their magic is less glowy and more “being able to actually get in the air with those stubby wings” and “managing to grow apple trees that actually bear fruit in the middle of an arid grassland, on top of growing apple trees at all in such”, which I’m pretty sure is significantly more impossible of the two.
Overall, I think we need to consider a few things when it comes to magic: - Autarch magic, and if it’s different from unicorn magic on any fundamental level - Whether or not we want unicorn magic to work like in the show or not, i.e., telekinesis+special talent related spells and that’s it. - Pony potentials. They’re just completely finicky right now and I don’t know if I’m the only one who finds them strange but shouldn’t there be, ya know, more variety. Not all earth ponies are tiny Big Macs. Not all pegasi need to dash. And not all unicorns just want to burn the world with sheer magical throughput. So why should the deepest parts of themselves, their highest potentials, all be so thoroughly set in stone by their race, rather than something like their special talent or personality? - What kind of scope do we want to see magic really performing at even at the highest non-alicorn levels. Shielding a whole city single-handed might be canon, but canon in terms of what was implied to be the highest-ranked guard there was who had gotten the attention of an alicorn princess and was Twilight Sparkle’s brother. Given Twilight’s pure magical output, him being completely excessive too isn’t that far off. Twilight and Shining are simply bad examples of unicorn power for anyone who wants to make a playable OC. - The biggest thing, after all the above is dealt with solidly, is figuring out mundane responses to magical prowess. I’m talking about actually countering mind magic by outthinking it. Breaking telekinesis without needing to be being ludicrously strong. Being able to train to get one’s body resistant to the kind of magic that would otherwise ignore even enchanted armor. That sort of thing.
|
|
|
| |
|
Aether Polemeios
|
Nov 17 2016, 12:39 AM
Post #2
|
|
- Posts:
- 323
- Group:
- Admins
- Member
- #2
- Joined:
- Mar 28, 2015
|
I got a few things to say to clear up certain bits of the issues Khaos brought up.
- Quote:
-
Autarch magic, and if it’s different from unicorn magic on any fundamental level
Autarch's don't have special talents like unicorns would. Autarchs can learn most kinds of magic through training, natural ability aside.
- Quote:
-
Pony potentials.
You may misunderstand a little. Pony potentials take the most basic thing the three pony races do, IE Do magic, fly and earth stuff, and Amplifies it through a sort of zen like trance. It makes unicorns generate more magic, mold it easier etc. It makes Pegasus ponies able to fly better because whatever magic lets them fly with their tiny wings is suddenly stronger. Gonna probably change what the Earth pony one does but you get the idea.
|
|
|
| |
|
Lolk
|
Nov 17 2016, 12:42 AM
Post #3
|
|
- Posts:
- 399
- Group:
- Members
- Member
- #38
- Joined:
- Aug 18, 2016
|
One of the thoughts I have on this solution is... Well, simplifying it obscures the actual purpose of it, but in short Make Everyone A Mage. In this case, a Mage is simply someone who has learned to wield the magic in their bodies in whatever way works best for their species. Releasing the "only ponies get magic and only horned ponies can use it" restrictions might be a good idea. [1]
[1]Additionally because magic is cool but not everyone wants to play a unicorn.
With regards to that, I present the Savage skies Series (https://www.fimfiction.net/index.php?view=category&user=13307)!
In this series, Unicorns actually end up seeming like the least powerful, mainly because A) the unicorn practioners of this focus of this series aren't really seen, and (more importantly) B) Horned magic is greater versatility, whereas other species have more power. Which makes sense, since Unicorns have a magical tuning fork growing out of their skulls.
You wouldn't even have to get very specific, just set some general guidelines and go from there. Deal with the rest on a case by case basis.
I'm not suggesting we take all the stuff straight from the fic (though we can, and probably will), but it does show some good examples.
Magic is very powerful right now because only one group has it. The three ways I see dealing with magic are:
A) Make it so mundane as to be a crutch. B) Make the gulf between 0th Level and 1st so large that anyone who can do flashy stuff is irrecoverably out of scope of all other characters, like Galadriel. C) Scale the rest of the other species up.
I am obviously proposing C, by simply taking the Nanoha approach of making being a Mage a basic entry requirement to murder hobo scale combat. However, this really only works if everyone can be a mage, some just... don't try.
|
|
|
| |
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
|
|